This invention relates to document processing systems in general and in particular to document processing systems adapted to be utilized in the processing of financial documents such as checks, invoices, payment advices, vouchers, drafts, credit card charges and the like.
Document processors are well known in the prior art. Document processors which read and sort financial documents have been in common use for some time, however, various other functions which are necessary to most financial operations have been relegated to separate subsystems or specialized processors to prevent major bottlenecks in the document processing system.
Among the peripheral features which have not, in the past, been accomplished by a primary document processor are encoding with magnetic ink, microfilming and endorsing.
Recently, state of the art document processors have been developed which utilize digital imaging to obtain visual data from a financial document for amount entry, or for correcting characters which are unreadable by machine. However, such document processors still require manual transfer of documents to other processors to accomplish traditionally slower speed operations such as encoding. This additional manual transfer can yield lower efficiency in processing and may result in possible errors.